How many of your email subscribers use Gmail? If your business is B2C it’s likely that many do. Let’s talk about Gmail’s new priority inbox and how it can affect your email effectiveness.

Google's Priority Inbox

Google’s Solution to Inbox Overload

We all receive so many emails these days that we need more than a spam filter — we need an assistant to sort through the masses of email and escalate what’s important.

Gmail’s priority inbox attempts to take on that role by noting whose emails you open (and reply to) and using that information to prioritize your emails. You can also manually move items up or down, teaching the filter to apply this rule to any similar emails.

The key advantage is that you no longer have to spend your valuable time sifting through ads and marketing campaigns. So now my son at RIT will run out of excuses for not reading Mom’s email about the Thanksgiving dinner because he was too busy sifting through dozens of emails about more important subjects. Right!

Why You Should Care

Another Hurdle to Reader Engagement

For businesses sending newsletters, product releases, marketing campaigns, and event promotions, there’s yet another potential barrier between you and your holy grail — email engagement, opens, click throughs to your landing page, and ideally, conversions. If it weren’t hard enough already, now you have to worry about getting into the RIGHT inbox.

How to Deal With It

Relevance to Reader Counts, More than Ever

As we know, a successful email campaign is an ongoing conversation between you and your readers where you are sharing relevant information on subjects that your readers care about. If you are following these guidelines and respecting your readers’ preferences you should be ok. If your readers are interested in your content and open your emails frequently you’ll be right up there in Google’s inbox.

So don’t panic and treat this as a gentle reminder from the folks at Google that your emails should be helpful, relevant, welcome, and most importantly, the continuation of a conversation that your subscriber wants to have.

What’s Been Your Experience with Priority Inbox?

Has this affected your personal or work email effectiveness? Are you a fan or a foe of the new Priority Inbox? We’d like to hear from you. Comment below!